Most EOR invoices get paid on trust. One lands at the start of the month, the total is close to last month’s, and someone in finance signs it off before lunch. That holds up right until it doesn’t — until a leaver turns out to have been paid for two months after they left, or a fee quoted on gross is quietly being charged on gross-plus-contributions, and nobody noticed because nobody was checking.
None of that is usually dishonesty. It’s that an EOR invoice buries a lot inside one number. Somewhere in that total is the employee’s pay, the taxes and contributions the provider settled with the state, whatever got reimbursed that month, and the provider’s own margin. If those aren’t broken out, you’re not approving a payroll cost. You’re approving a figure and hoping.
What follows is a way to pull that figure apart and check it against what the person actually costs to employ. It’s written around Belarus, where the numbers are specific and the currency question never quite leaves you alone, but the method travels to anywhere you employ through someone else.
Start with knowing what you’re looking at. A decent EOR bill holds four things, and the first job each month is confirming they show up as four things rather than one lump.
There’s the pay — salary plus any bonus or overtime for the period. There’s the employer’s statutory cost, which in Belarus means FSZN contributions and Belgosstrakh injury-insurance premiums owed on top of gross. There’s whatever the provider laid out on your behalf and is now recharging: travel, per diems, the occasional bit of equipment. And there’s the fee, which is the only part you’re really buying.
Companies hiring engineers and product staff through an EOR arrangement carry all four in every bill, yet plenty of providers show only the bottom line. A one-line invoice — “payroll and taxes, September” — proves the money went out. It says nothing about whether it went out correctly. The single line usually isn’t hiding anything; it’s just how a provider that prices on processing volume thinks about the job. Reporting, to them, is an add-on. To you it’s most of the reason you’re paying someone else to run this at all. So before anything else, insist the four parts appear separately. Everything below depends on being able to see them apart.
The common mistake is to read the invoice and decide whether it looks about right. You can’t judge it against itself. You need a figure of your own, built from the contract and the published rates, to hold it up against.
For a Belarusian hire that figure isn’t hard to put together. Take contractual gross. The flat 13% income tax and the 1% employee FSZN contribution come out of that gross — the employee nets the rest — so neither is an extra cost to you, though finance teams book them as one more often than you’d expect. What you add on top is the employer’s own burden: FSZN at 34%, plus Belgosstrakh at whatever rate your industry’s risk class carries. Gross plus those two is the real cost of the person, before anyone’s fee. The rates and the framework behind them live on the national legal information portal, the same source the provider files against, so you’re not taking their word for the arithmetic.
A quick example. Say someone is on 6,000 BYN a month. Their tax of 780 and their 1% FSZN of 60 come out of that, and they take home the balance. On top, you pay employer FSZN of 2,040 and a little Belgosstrakh — tens of rubles, not hundreds, depending on the risk class. Call it a touch over 8,000 BYN before the fee. That’s the cost, not 6,000 plus every line printed on the payslip. Add the fee and you have the number the invoice should land on, give or take the month’s expenses and any variable pay. Anything much higher is a question you get to ask.
The baseline moves from month to month, and that’s fine as long as it moves for reasons you can name. A signing bonus, a salary review that’s just taken effect, a new hire who started mid-month and earned a partial salary — each shifts the expected total, and each is something you can see coming and tick off. What you’re actually hunting for is the movement you can’t account for, because that’s where the mistakes live.
Once your own number exists, the reconciliation is fast — a short run of deliberate checks instead of a general sense that the total seems fine.
1. Does gross match the contract? Line the base up against the current contract, then deal with bonuses, overtime and one-offs on their own. If gross has moved since last month, there should be a reason travelling with it. The two usual culprits are a leaver still drawing salary and a bonus that shows up in two consecutive months. Cross-check the names on the invoice against your own list of who is actually employed; a leaver who slips through is the cheapest error to prevent and the most awkward to recover once the money has gone.
2. Are the contributions right? Recompute FSZN at 34% of the contribution base, and check Belgosstrakh against the correct risk class. These sit on a defined base, not on the invoice total. Get the contribution figure wrong and then charge a fee on top of it, and you end up paying for the same mistake twice over.
3. Can you see the fee? It belongs on its own line, whether it’s a flat amount per head or a percentage. The moment it’s folded into “taxes and payroll” is the moment it can drift without anyone noticing. If you can’t point to the fee on the page, you can’t say you’re paying what you negotiated. On a per-head fee the arithmetic is a five-second check — headcount times the agreed rate. A percentage fee takes a moment longer, but it should still reconcile to the penny.
4. Is statutory cost passed through at cost? FSZN and Belgosstrakh are money the provider hands to the state, and they should reach you at face value. A provider taking its percentage on gross-plus-contributions rather than on gross alone is skimming the government’s money — trivial on one payslip, less so across twenty people over a year. Where the contract doesn’t spell out the fee base, assume the provider chose the one that suits it, and settle the point before the next run.
5. Are expenses itemised and classified? Travel, accommodation and per diems each want their own line, split by type, with anything taxable flagged. The treatment isn’t uniform. A per diem within the statutory norm is tax-free, whereas an over-norm allowance becomes taxable pay the provider must withhold on. A single “expenses” figure with no breakdown hides exactly the item most likely to catch up with you later.
6. Do accruals appear, and does the timing fit your close? The provider works to the local statutory calendar; you work to the group close. Make sure earned-but-unpaid items — leave built up, a bonus vesting across several months — turn up as accruals rather than surfacing only when the cash leaves. Under IAS 19, those are costs of the period they’re earned in, and a cash-only invoice won’t sit cleanly in an accrual ledger.
7. Which FX rate was used? Ruble costs get converted for your reporting, and the choice of rate is not a footnote. Reconcile the ruble figures first, then look at the conversion, and find out which rate produced the number in your currency. A booking-date rate, a payment-date rate and a month-end rate will each give you a different answer for the same cost — and whichever it is ought to be the same one every month.
Run the checks for a few months and you start seeing the same handful of things trip you up again and again.
The one-line invoice is the obvious one. Nobody’s cooking the books — the provider just won’t break the number down, and if you can’t break it down, you can’t check it. Then there’s the quiet markup on the statutory side: a little margin tacked onto contributions that were supposed to reach you at cost. That one’s sneaky. The contributions are genuine and the totals look about right, so nothing jumps out at you; the only way to catch it is to work out 34% of the base yourself and hold the two figures side by side. A few percent out each month doesn’t sound like much, but it can run for years before anyone spots it.
Currency is the one that costs the most over time. You get a figure in your own currency with no ruble amount beside it and nothing to say which rate produced it. Nine times out of ten the provider has reached for the National Bank reference rate — fine for the tax filing, but not usually the rate your group closes its books at. On a single invoice it’s invisible. Give it twelve months and it becomes a variance big enough to matter, and you’ll normally trip over it at the audit, where it’s a headache to account for. And then the simplest one of the lot: a line that changed with nothing beside it to say why.
None of this means the provider is bad at the job. More often they’ve sold you processing and left the reporting as an optional extra — the kind of thing you get if you push for it. Either way the fix doesn’t change. Get the detail written into the agreement before you sign, not in month three, when you’re squinting at an invoice you can’t make sense of.
A check you have to talk yourself into every month is one you’ll quietly abandon by spring. Better to push the work back into the contract and the reporting format, so the invoice arrives already in a shape you can reconcile.
In practice that means agreeing, up front, that the monthly pack separates the four parts, breaks expenses out by category with the taxable ones flagged, states the FX convention, and carries an accrual view. It means asking for a pre-run file you approve before any money moves, so errors get caught on the way out instead of clawed back afterward. Write each of these down as a named deliverable, with a format and a date and a consequence for missing it, rather than a soft service-level target. That’s roughly the reporting cadence a foreign HQ should be pressing for from the first call.
It also pays to run the reconciliation on the same clock as the rest of your Belarus accounting, since payroll, expenses and the statutory books all pull from the same numbers and close together. A provider who keeps one of them tidy usually keeps the others the same way, and if one arrives as a mess, don’t count on the rest being clean.
The register is the official record — what the employee was paid and what went to the state, in rubles, in the format the authorities expect. The invoice is what you’re billed: the payroll figures plus the provider’s fee and any recharged expenses. Reconciling just means tracing one back to the other and confirming the extras are correct.
No. FSZN and Belgosstrakh go straight to the state and should reach you at cost; the fee is where the provider earns. If the percentage is being taken on gross-plus-contributions instead of gross, you’re paying margin on money the provider never keeps. Worth checking on the very first invoice.
For the local record, it has to be rubles — the tax authorities leave no choice there. Your reporting numbers are a different matter. Those should convert at the rate your group consolidates on, rather than something picked for the provider’s convenience. Agree on the approach in writing at the start and ask to see both the ruble and the converted amounts together. Leave it vague and you’re signing up to chase FX differences for the life of the contract.
Make them put it on its own line. If all you get is one “payroll and taxes” figure, there’s no way to confirm you’re paying the rate you agreed. Anyone set up for foreign clients itemises it without being asked; if yours won’t, that tells you something.
Sorting this out now is far cheaper than fixing it later, so be specific in the agreement about what the provider owes you each month. You want the invoice broken down — pay, contributions, expenses and fee each standing on their own rather than rolled into a single number. Beyond that, ask for a pre-run version to sign off before any money moves, clear flags on whatever’s taxable, a fixed rule for how currency gets converted, and an accrual view so earned-but-unpaid amounts land in the month they’re earned. A provider used to foreign clients won’t blink at any of it.
You brought in an EOR so the employer side would stop eating your time. Sensible move. The catch is that the invoice is still yours to check, and a bundled total is exactly the sort of thing that gets waved through and never revisited. The payment itself is rarely where it goes wrong — it’s the stuff around it. A fee charged on the wrong base. A per diem that should have been tax-free, taxed anyway. A conversion rate you can’t trace back to anything. An accrual you were expecting that simply doesn’t land. Any one of them, in a single month, isn’t worth the argument. They don’t stay in a single month, and by the time you’ve got twenty people on the payroll they’ve stopped being rounding errors.
The seven checks are how you keep on top of it. Run them and you can approve the month without hoping for the best. Get them written into the contract and most of the checking moves back to the provider, where it belonged in the first place. If you’re weighing up a move into Belarus, or you’re already there and the invoices have turned into guesswork, get in touch. Ask about deliverables, formats and dates before price comes up at all — you’ll learn more from that than from any quote.
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